Homemade bread looks quite different than bread from a package.

Take your average loaf of Wonderbread. It’s going to look the same no matter if you buy it in Pennsylvania, Texas, California or somewhere in between. Wonderbread – always looks the same. It’s mass produced for an audience of millions, always cut the same way, packaged the same way, smelling the same way – completely uniform in order to maximize efficiency.

But homemade bread is different. Sometimes it’s a bit saltier; sometimes it doesn’t rise quite right; sometimes the crust is thicker than the day before. That’s because a machine didn’t make this kind of bread. Instead, it’s personalized. It’s touched, kneaded, and baked by hand, and so what comes out of the oven is not a complete carbon copy of what came out of the oven yesterday.

That’s not to say it’s not still bread; it certainly is. It has the same qualities; the same ingredients. But the end product is always going to be unique from yesterday.

So, too, does the bread God provides for His children look a bit different each and everyday. The bread for today is not the bread from yesterday neither will it be the bread for tomorrow. It has the same intrinsic characteristics of provision, sustenance, compassion, and grace, but it comes out of the divine oven in a little different form each and every time.

Jesus told us to ask God for this bread – today’s bread – not yesterday’s bread or tomorrow’s bread, but to pray like this: “Give us today our daily bread…” (Matthew 6:11).

This single sentence of prayer acknowledges the wisdom, power, and specific provision of God, for we not only believe that God will give us whatever we need for this day, but that He knows the unique composition of what that provision will look like…for this day.

Today the bread might look like patience. Or courage. Or compassion. Or actual physical bread. But tomorrow? Well, God knows what tomorrow holds. And so we pray and ask for not the same bread He delivered yesterday, but the bread for today. And we trust that God knows what the bread for tomorrow needs to look like as well.

Our Father knows our needs before we do, and He knows them to a deeper extent than we ever will. And we can know that what He delivers to us as our daily bread is exactly what we need for that day. Sometimes it might not look tasty to us at all, but we can trust that is is the very staple we need most on a given day with a given set of circumstances.

We can know that on a given day, like today, that before we even pray for what we think the bread needs to look like, God has already been mixing the ingredients and fashioning His provision so that He can cook up exactly what we need.